Los Angeles-based composer and screenwriter (and sometimes Atlasphere columnist) Mike Shapiro tells us that, in addition to launching a brand new MikeMusic.com web site, he’s also got a ten-minute musical, “The Alleged Adventures of Blenderman,” being performed this weekend in Los Angeles.
“Though it may not be a concretization of life as it can and should be,” he writes, “it is sort of cute.”
Fair enough. If you’re in the Los Angeles area and looking for some diversion this weekend, consider sending a little ticket-love in Mike’s direction.
I’ve gotten more than a few chuckles reading Mike’s blog over the years, so it’s bound to be pretty funny.
Category: The Atlasphere
All things Atlasphere can be found here, columns, podcasts, interesting anecdotes, and more.
Michelle Fram Cohen Publishes "My Atlasphere Collection"
Have you enjoyed Michelle Fram Cohen’s articles at the Atlasphere — such as her recently-republished “Crosspoints: A Chance at Self-Redemption”?
If so, you may be interested in her new anthology, My Atlasphere Collection, now available as an eBook from MobiPocket.
Maggie Gallagher: Three Cheers for Ayn Rand!
Writing for Yahoo News, former National Review editor Maggie Gallagher has penned a rousing and insightful defense of Atlas Shrugged.
She rightly chastizes Terry Teachout for his silly assertion in National Review that Rand writes a pretty good potboiler, a plot “complete with sex scenes and a shoot-’em-up finale. No wonder that it has sold like soap for half a century.”
As Gallagher puts it: “Novels, even page-turning potboilers with lots of sex and gunplay, do not typically sell like soap, year-in and year-out, for half a century.” Atlas Shrugged, she points out, is currently the #1 selling book on Amazon in the category of “literature and fiction-classics.”
So why, then, does the novel continue to sell so well? Gallagher presents her own theory — and it’s a good one:
The key to Ayn Rand is that she pictured America largely from early films from Hollywood. As a young girl growing up in the grim world of communist Russia, she saw America as we dreamed ourselves to be, and she longed her whole life with a child’s intensity to make this vision real, to live in it. We respond to her novels because they offer us one deep strand of American self-identity — as individualists, yes, but individualists who together dream big dreams, conquer wild frontiers, invent the future, remake our very selves.
She understood, the way so many pampered Hollywood artists don’t, that much of the romance of America is in business — in our dreams of making it, by making big new things, things no man has ever made before. Rand is virtually alone in seeing businessmen as fellow artists: makers, creators, inventors. In her novels, the greatness of the artist was matched by the greatness of the architect, the scientist, the entrepreneur and the railroad executive. The Homer of our era, she sang the song by which so many Americans live our lives.
Well said. Read her full article for more.
Myanmar: Right out of Atlas Shrugged?
Don Hauptman points out a passage from an article in Thursday’s New York Times that sounds, well, straight out of Atlas Shrugged:
In Thailand and Myanmar, the military has been deeply involved in politics in recent decades. Thailand has had more than a dozen coups since the 1930s and, after the overthrow last year of a democratically elected government, power remains in the militaryâ??s hands.
The salient difference, says Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is that Thailandâ??s leaders have allowed businesses to thrive.
During 45 years of misrule, Myanmarâ??s generals have almost entirely dismantled the economy, he said. There are no effective property rights, and contract enforcement is nonexistent.
â??If in other countries ruling regimes behave occasionally as Mafioso in skimming a cut from prosperous business, then Burmaâ??s is more like a looter â?? destroying what it can neither create nor understand,â? Mr. Turnell said.
(Emphasis added)
See the full article, “Across the River: 2 Divergent Paths in Southeast Asia,” for more background.
Russian Translation of "Crosspoints" Hits Top Sales
The Russian translation of Crosspoints: A Novel by Choice by Alexandra York is a front runner in Russia, where it was featured at the Moscow Book Fair. Praised by Moscow publisher Mir Knigi as “Beatiful and Deep” with “High Style and Spirit,” Crosspoints broke the language barrier with over 10,000 copies sold.
Crosspoints was reviewed on The Atlasphere in 2004, when it was first published.
Read the announcement on Alexandra York’s web site.
Nigeria through the Lens of Atlas Shrugged?
AllAfrica.com has a new article in which a Nigerian native sizes up his country, and its politicians, somewhat through the lens of Atlas Shrugged.
When I read the article at lunchtime, I stumbled over the phrase “disintegration of rational inquiry” — but I think the author is referring to the modern era’s decreasing respect for rational inquiry.
An excerpt:
One of my favorite authors, Ayn Rand, taught the virtue of selfishness and the disintegration of rational inquiry. Her best seller Atlas Shrugged is however one book that I return to every now and then. The book was written in 1957. Ayn Rand, a Russian migrant that lived in the USA and became a house-hold name for her teachings on objectivism, was probably the best known and perhaps widest read philosopher of the 20th century. She was a woman of substance.
Years ago when I first read Atlas Shrugged I immediately contextualized it in Nigeria . But little did I know that a stalemate would result from a warped definition of objectivity, a dire need for a political philosophy and a shrug by an Atlas – Umaru Musa YarAdua. Atlas Shrugged is for me a book for all times. It groups objectivism, self-interest and capitalism all in one. In plain text, according to Ayn Rand herself – nature is to be commanded and must be obeyed, or wishing won’t make it so; you can’t eat your cake and have it too; man is an end himself; give me liberty or give me death.
Nigeria witnessed the disintegration of rational inquiry recently when Patricia Olubunmi Etteh’s power rangers insisted that she would be judge in her own case. Looking at what transpired in that dark period of the House of Representatives that culminated with the death of Dr. Aminu Safana, one would expect nothing to follow but recall, to rid the house of the pea brains that turned it into a house of horror. To think out of the box is one thing. But to think stupidly out of the box in order to justify the unjustifiable, for whatever reason, is sure enough reason for an elected representative to be shown the way out.
See the full article for more.
Ayn Rand Lexicon Now Available Online!
The Ayn Rand Lexicon is an indispensible tool for any serious student of Ayn Rand’s ideas. And now it’s available online.
From the Ayn Rand Institute’s announcement:
Through a special arrangement with the publisher, the editor and the Estate of Ayn Rand, ARI has received exclusive permission to present The Ayn Rand Lexicon — now available in its entirety, free of charge, to Web visitors. Edited by Harry Binswanger, and with an introduction by Leonard Peikoff, this important book presents all of the key ideas of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, in an encyclopedic reference of stunning breadth and depth.
Visit AynRandLexicon.com for full access.
Greg Zanetti Cites Ayn Rand on Consuming vs. Producing
Fellow New Mexican (woo hoo!) Greg Zanetti cites Ayn Rand in his market report his week. Some excerpts:
In America, we have adopted the philosophy that consumption is more important. 70 percent of our economy is consumption based. After the 9-11 attacks, President Bush told us to go shopping. Alan Greenspan even went so far as to say we were doing the world a favor by consuming their goods and thereby acting as the worldâ??s growth engine. …
A contrary opinion, however, comes from the brilliant free market thinker and author Ayn Rand.
To Ms. Rand, â??consumersâ?¦ are irrelevant to economics.â? She believed the title of consumer must be earned by first being a producer. She goes on to say that â??wealth represents goods that have been produced but not yet consumed.â?
Think of it this way: Imagine you are a farmer and winter is approaching. You have had a good year though and you have plenty of food to last you until the next harvest. Beyond this, you have seed to plant for next spring. In short, you have saved, you have produced wealth that has not yet been consumed.
And here is where Ayn Rand will say we in America have turned economics on its head. Today, in order to consume, you do not first have to produce; all you have to do is borrow. Thus, you are reaching into the future and pulling demand into the present. Thus, you are using wealth that has not yet been produced. Or to continue our farmer analogy, we are consuming our seed stock.
Keep reading for the punch line.
Going through an Ayn Rand phase? Uh, yep.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Phil Kloer offers a somewhat condescending opportunity to talk about “Going through an Ayn Rand phase” — whether it happened to you, etc.
Give â??em hell, folks.
Invitation to the Objectivism Seminar
Atlasphere member Greg Perkins, a regular blogger at NoodleFood, has begun organizing some new telephone seminars on Objectivism.
The seminars will be book-based, starting with Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics before proceeding to OPAR and other Objectivist classics.
From the announcement:
Truly living well calls for engaging fundamental philosophical ideas and integrating their use into our everyday lives, our everyday actions, our way of beingâ??into our souls. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to get busy with all the urgent things around us, and we can drift, distracted and disintegrated. For those of us who want an ongoing practice in such engagement (and those who want to explore the need for that in the first place), I have created The Objectivism Seminar.
The Objectivism Seminar is a weekly online conference call to systematically work through the philosophy of Ayn Rand via the books of prominent Rand scholars. These moderated, one-hour sessions will be recorded and podcast to allow review, catch-up, and even disconnected participation. The idea is to give peopleâ??new and experienced alikeâ??a forum to chew through key Objectivist works and tour the complete system, further clarifying, integrating, and grounding their grasp of the ideas.
Because it is an ongoing seminar, we will have incentive to keep up with the steady schedule of study and stay equipped to consider fresh angles, concretizations, challenges, and applications from other participants. And because life is so full for many of us, I am purposefully keeping the reading load light and the method of participation unobtrusive. The plan is that we will spend almost as much time discussing the ideas as reading about them. Study like this is productive for both experienced students of Objectivism and those new to Rand’s ideas: I’ve read all of these books, some several times, and I would expect to get at least as much out of this as someone going through them for the first time.
If you are interested, please look over the FAQ below and head over to www.ObjectivismSeminar.com to sign up!
For more information see Greg’s full announcement, which includes answers to some frequently asked questions about the seminar.